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Jan Willis was feeling euphoric. Sitting in the basement of a church in London's
impoverished East End last summer, she looked around and realized that of the 40-
odd people in the room, 31 were black.

"Black Buddhists!" she exclaims: at the-memory. "In 25 years in Buddhism, I
had never been in such a sangha. I felt so-high: It was great.

For Willis and the handful-of African-American Buddhist teachers now, beginning
to speak out, Buddhism in America has-been a homogeneous world inhabited
largely by upper-middle-class whites.

"There are a lot of black Buddhists who are in the closet. They just don't feel
comfortable being part of the great white shagha; says Insight Meditation teacher
Ralph Steele. "One of the most common phrases I hear from young black
Buddhists when they do step out into the white Buddhist sangha is that they feel
uncomfortable."

Through the eyes of African-American teachers like Shu Shin priest Joseph
Jarman, white Buddhist America is largely blind to the existence of a black sangha.
That was driven home to him at last year's Buddhism in America conference.
"People there had never known there were African-American Buddhist Priests and
educators in this country; they just never appear," he recalls. "That was like
opening another door."